Best Australian Short Stories (30 page)

“It will be blowing a gale out there, Mater.”

“We can sit in the car.”

“Very well,” said Uncle John. “Very well.”

So we took a track through heath and low scrub until the sea lay less than fifty yards away, its range of sound overpowering the noise of the car, its spray blowing on our windows. We pulled up beside the Loch Ard Gorge and parked in wind that rocked the car on its springs.

I stepped outside and began wiping the windows, my clothes lashing about me. Through half-closed eyes I could see the lines of waves careering towards the cliffs. Their sounds had long been familiar to me: the background roar, the long-drawn sighs, the tearing sounds as of giant sheets of calico being torn across. I could see the incredibly narrow entrance of the gorge, with its torrents of white water pouring back off the rocks and, farther in, the crescent of protected beach.

When I got back into the car Grandmother Warden was staring seawards while the others ate their lunch.

“There’s nothing to see of the ship, John?”

“It was lost nearly fifty years ago, Mater.”

“Of course,” she said.

She was looking at the waves with pursed lips, as if assessing an adversary. “There was no chance to swim?”

“It was a sea like this and they were thrown against the cliffs—except the two young people.”

He began to go over the main events of the wreck: the captain’s uncertainty of his whereabouts; the ship striking the reef; the miracle which brought Tom Pearce, then Eva Carmichael through the entrance when all the rest were dead.

When he had finished, Grandmother Warden said, “God be with them.” She stared for a long time at the waves and then, as if embarrassed, said, “Children, go and stretch your legs.”

We stepped into the turmoil of noise and spray, Judith walking ahead to leave me in no doubt she was master. She bent into the wind, going towards the entrance of the gorge, her plait streaming behind her, on until she reached the brink of the headland above the sea. Standing there at the edge she looked back at me tauntingly. In the same moment the wind ballooned her skirt and her feet moved on the rock. She swayed precariously, then, as if blown inland, came running back, her face white. I followed her down the track to the gorge out of sight of the car. She burst into tears.

“How can I face her ?” she said.

“Face who?” I asked.

“Oh, you are a fool!” she cried, immediately recovering herself.

She turned away and dried her eyes, and we went back to the car. Its windows were so misted again with salt that the others could have seen nothing, nor did they say a word; but on the way to Port Campbell and beyond, Judith sat sullenly in her corner.

All along the coast we paused wherever wrecks had occurred. At these places Uncle John would mention the name of the ship and Grandmother Warden would refer to it as if the calamity had occurred only a few weeks before.

Because of these delays it was almost three o’clock before we neared our destination. When we came to the wide, dark estuary of Curdie’s River, Grandmother Warden stopped us and had me clean the windows again.

We crossed the long bridge to the western side, where Peterborough huddled under the wind, its roofs rusted, its windows blurred, its plants succumbed to the sea. Old though its few houses looked to me, to Grandmother Warden they were new. There had been blacks, she said, watching from the shore, ready to take what they could get when the baggage was washed onto the beach; but otherwise no one, not a house, not a white man closer than Dr Curdie up the river.

We drove to a headland twenty or thirty feet above the sea. Below, through a sandy beach, the river had its outlet. Directly off the river mouth, perhaps three hundred yards out, two rocks, or two protrusions of the one rock, rose four or five feet above the sea, mushroom-shaped, the only part of an underlying reef standing clear of broken water. Over this reef the waves broke with cracking sounds audible above the general roar.

“The Schomberg Rock,” said Uncle John.

“Yes,” said Grandmother Warden quietly. She ran the window down and looked out from it. “There was a sandbar running towards the shore?”

“It was washed out many years ago,” said Uncle John. “And the ship?”

“She’s under ten feet of sand.”

“Oh dear,” she said; and again, “Oh dear.”

We sat there saying nothing, awed to see this aged woman looking again on the cliffs and this sea and the dreary hinterland. Out there she had stood on the deck of a lost ship as the bows pounded the rocks and the forbidding new land rose and fell beyond the rail.

The open window was on the lee side of the car, and from this Grandmother Warden continued to stare, her cheeks pinkened. Uncle John said, “I think we could leave your grandmother alone.”

Since she did not demur, we stepped out into the wind. Uncle ohn contented himself with walking up and down the headland, his clothes flapping about him, but Judith began descending to the beach. I followed her in the tremendous din of waves.

It is easy in retrospect to see the significance to Grandmother Warden of the day’s remaining incident—a trivial enough incident, comical even. The waves were driving far up the sand, and spume was blowing the full length of the beach; nevertheless, Judith took off her shoes and began to walk in the water. Gradually she put ten or twelve feet between us until she was a foot deep, the backwash curling against her legs.

I treated this exhibition with indifference. Behind us the car still overlooked the beach and Uncle John still walked up and down the road. I was looking towards him when a wave larger than the rest washed over my shoes. At the same time I saw Judith thrown to her hands and knees.

My first impulse was to laugh, but the receding water rolled over her as if she had been a piece of wood. I ran down and helped her to her feet. This, I suppose, would have been enough; in fact, I thought she hardly needed help. But on an impulse, and thinking I was observed and should play the part of a man, and being at the same time struck by the next wave, I picked her up bodily and ran through the drag of water, both of us drenched and Judith kicking wildly.

When I set her down I thought she would hit me. It had been her second humiliation for the day, and this, I suppose, was catastrophic. She shouted that she could look after herself very well, and started back to the car. I walked half-despondent, half-amused after her. It was raining, but the rain could scarcely have wet us more.

When we reached the car Grandmother Warden was expostulating angrily and Uncle John was attempting to calm her. She was not angry because our clothes were soaked, or because she had thought Judith was in danger; in fact, I had little idea what had upset her.

“The girl was quite capable of looking after herself,” she said to me.

I said bewilderedly that I was sorry.

Judith glared at me from her corner of the car, and Grandmother Warden craned round and fixed her falcon gaze on me. “I’m sorry,” I kept saying.

“Good lord!” exclaimed Uncle John. “The boy only did what any man might have done in the circumstances.”

“Let us go home,” said Grandmother Warden, ignoring him.

And so the “pilgrimage” ended, and I felt myself the cause of its ruination. We drove most of the way home in silence, keenly aware that Grandmother Warden was displeased.

At dusk, when we reached the valley, she went into the house on Judith’s arm, walking very slowly. She said suddenly to Judith and me, “Before you go to bed, children, I should like you to come to my room.”

Her voice was no longer angry; only tired.

Judith went to the bedroom before me, to give Grandmother Warden her tea. She was in bedraggled clothes still, her plait streaked with salt. Grandmother Warden was lying against pillows in the great blackwood bed my grandfather had built, lying to one side of it as if, even after fifty years, she expected her husband to return.

I could never come into this room without feeling that even now my grandfather still lived. He had made the furniture, and on the walls were photographs of him: one as a young man in the uniform of an officer of the Blackball Line; another, twenty-five or thirty years later, when he had grown a beard and life in the new country had reflected in his eyes, and a last one of him working on the frame of the Warden Vale house.

In the lamplight I had the impression that Grandmother Warden’s long accumulation of years had in a few hours overtaken her. Although she was sitting up, a bed-jacket round her shoulders, her hair in two steel-grey plaits, she looked older by a generation than she had looked that same morning.

She said vaguely, “I have something to tell you.” Then she lapsed into silence, looking beyond us. Under its glass dome on the mantel her year-clock rotated left and right, left and right, silently.

“You knew Elizabeth,” she said all at once. She did not say, “Great-aunt Elizabeth”, simply “Elizabeth”. Then she stopped again, her lips moving silently.

Her next words at first seemed inconsequential, as if her mind had wandered to other happenings. “I could not expect her forgiveness,” she said, “but I could have sought it. He was promised to her, you see? And all that voyage I tried to take him. And I did take him. You understand?” she said, looking at us sharply. “You understand?”

Neither of us knew what to answer. As if she had mustered concentration again she said resonantly, You understand?” Judith could only say, “Perhaps you should sleep, Grandma.” For my part I felt aware suddenly of my lack of years. Why was this being said to us? If it had to be said, why not to our parents? I concentrated in embarrassment on the clock’s slow rotations. “We were all on the sand by the mouth of the river,” she said. “That was the last time the family was together. I used to think if I went back, I might feel near them all. But I never went; not until today.”

I saw that she had moved infinitely far from us, back to the beach with the surf behind her and the
Schoenberg
rolling against the reef and the blacks waiting along the cliff tops; and men and women, absurdly attired in London clothes, standing on the edge of that overpowering country.

And then, as if to shed light on the day’s happenings, she said, “He carried me from the little boat and set me on the sand. And then we went away together, with nothing, to start our lives. And I was eighteen.”

When we heard this, I looked away from her. I heard Judith say unsteadily, “You are tired.” She looked at me, and I went out and asked Uncle John to come. Then I walked about outside, along the creek.

That was our last Christmas at Warden Vale. Grandmother Warden died the next winter. It was a severe winter, the creek running a banker for weeks on end, the cloud descending into the valley. We went there several times, my mother taking her turn at the bedside. Grandmother Warden was in her room all day by then and her mind was seldom unclouded. She died in the August.

It was incredible that her era had ended. All at once the wreck of the
Schomberg
and my grandparents’ journey to the valley became as much history as Henty’s coming to Portland, or the loss of Gellibrand and Hesse. I think only Judith and I knew the significance of the “pilgrimage”, and perhaps only I felt irrational regrets.

SHE watched him coming back from the gate, walking towards the slightly ornate suburban style house she felt to be so incongruous set down on the bare rise, behind it the sheds and yards and the thin belt of shade trees. Yet he and his family were proud of it, grateful for its convenience and modernity, and had so clearly not understood her first quizzical remarks that she had never repeated them.

He stood on the edge of the veranda, and she saw in his face the anger that seemed to deepen because he knew the feeling to be impotent. She said:

“What is it?”

“Mackay’s two big tractors—that they were going to use for the scrub clearing—they’ve been interfered with. Sand put into the oil. The one they started up will cost a few hundred to repair.”

“But no one would do that,” she said, as if already it were settled, her temporizing beside the point.

“We know who did it.”

“But surely,” she said, “he didn’t come right up to the sheds— as close as that to the house—”

“No. They left the tractors down in the bottom paddock. Where they were going to start clearing.”

“And now—they can’t?”

“Now they can’t. Not till the tractor’s repaired.”

She looked towards the distant line of the low scrub that was deepening in colour as the evening came. She said:

“That is what he wanted.”

“What he wants is to make as much trouble as he can. We haven’t done anything to him.”

“You were going to clear the land along the bottom paddock at the back of Mackay’s. Where he lives.”

“Where he lives?”

“You told me he lived in the bush there.”

“He lives anywhere. And he takes the ball floats off the taps in the sheep tanks and the water runs to waste, and he breaks the fences when he feels like it, and leaves the gates open—”

“You think he does this deliberately?”